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Discussion in 'Windows XP' started by Steve R Jones, 2003/05/27.

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  1. 2003/05/27
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff Thread Starter

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    Month old Dell 2.53 with a Gig of ram "“ XP Pro

    In task manager I added a column to monitor VM size. Noticed a ton of stuff there. Thought it would be nice if the system would use all the darn ram I have. So I went to System->Advanced->Performance and under memory usage, I placed the check mark for "adjust for best performance of system cache." Rebooted and BANG. What a way to destroy an operating system.

    I received a blue mem dump screen. Rebooted again and got "need to check drive for consistency" error message. I let it do the checking. After that, got several "write delay failed" error messages. Unable to recover corrupted files in Windows, Windows\system32, Docs and settings, _restore, just to name a few. "Files will be lost." And boy howdy are there ever lost/gone… Looks like all the system files that were "cached" out died and went to heaven. Couldn’t do a restore and re-installing didn’t help.

    Always wanted to reformat a new Dell and get rid of the over head…
     
    Steve R Jones,
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  2. 2003/05/27
    reboot

    reboot Inactive

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    System cache is not VM, and it's easy to confuse the two.
    The first option in the section, Programs, allocates more RAM to running applications. For desktop systems with very little RAM, this selection gives the best performance. In systems with less RAM, you need to devote as much RAM as possible to just running Windows and your applications. For a server or a desktop with a lot of RAM, however, choosing the System Cache setting will yield better performance. When set to System Cache, the system will use most of the available RAM as a disk cache, which can result in major performance improvements on systems that depend on disk I/O, however leaving little for the running of programs, especially on startup, and if there's not enough RAM available for the needed services, and all running processes/programs, something must give way.
    I'm guessing that you have lots of RAM, but you also have quite a few programs started/running on startup. Optimized for cache would be great for a server, running just windows, and the server software. Optimized for programs is where you should have left it (duh!), and then adjust the VM in it's options separately.

    On the bright side, you DO get to format the Dell, and get rid of the junk. Just think of how much faster it will be, and how much you're going to rely on the ability of Windows XP to manage RAM.
    If you REALLY want to optimize the swap/VM, then set it static at 768 meg max and min, and then put "ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1" in the [386enh] section of system.ini
    Yes, this works on XP as well as 95. 98, 2k, and ME.
     
    Last edited: 2003/05/27
    reboot,
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  4. 2003/05/27
    Steve R Jones

    Steve R Jones SuperGeek Staff Thread Starter

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    Thanks Jim.

    Have run across this GREAT article on VM:

    http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

    Introduction

    This page attempts to be a stand-alone description for general users of the way Virtual Memory operates in Windows XP. Other pages on this site are written mainly for Windows 98/ME (see Windows 98 & Win ME Memory Management) and, while a lot is in common, there are significant differences in Windows XP
     
    Steve R Jones,
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